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Monthly Archives: April 2006

I was browsing an Artima article and came across a sponsored link to a AJAX GUI Framework called Tibco General Interface.
Clicked around a bit and found this screencast from Jon Udell here
Has anybody used this ? Want to share some comments ? Post them publicly here, or send me private email. This seems somewhat interesting.

After having craptastic after sales service with my iPod mini, I vowed that Apple would not get any more of my cash, so last Christmas to replace the miserable pile of shit that was the iPod mini, I bought an iriver H10 6Gb
Here is my pico-review.
Sound quality – fantastic – same as the iPod
Menu/UI – not bad – not as responsive as the iPod
Controls – not bad – not as good as the iPod
Music transfer program – brilliant ; heaps better than iTunes
Battery Life – amazingly good, at least 8-9 hours – kills the iPod
FM Radio – pretty ordinary sound – iPod doesn’t have one, but who cares
Quality – not having sent it back after 1 month – better than the iPod
If you’ve been indoctrinated into the “Cult of Apple” then you’re going to hate this because it’s not “cool enough”, and if you’re less technically savvy (hi Mum) then probably the installation/file transfer is a bit more complicated than iTunes (but with less spyware).
One thing that’s a bit annoying is the fiddly cabling for charging and music transfer. It’s a nice setup as you only need 1 set of cables, but the plugs and stuff are just a bit hokey. The iPod “dual-use cables” are a much better idea.
A nice thing about the iriver that isn’t immediately obvious. You can purchase a separate battery for them. So, no stupid Apple tax on your battery life, and from memory it wasn’t expensive (~$70 Australian). This means I can have a spare battery hanging around, and I don’t need that stupid “battery pack” to make it work.
Currently I’d give the iriver an 8/10 all round, and would recommend it to anybody looking for an MP3 player who is marginally more technically savvy than a complete computer-phobe.

Just to make WoW (World of Warcraft) more attractive to nerds, Blizzard has used a programming language (Lua) to write all the UI components.
What’s even cooler is that you can write your own client side components that can do special things.
So, I did. I play a Rogue on the Dragonblight server (Pewsey, Human) in the raiding guild Crux. One of the raiding skills of the Rogue is the Slice and Dice skill, which (mapped to 4) is pressed about 20% of the time (65% backstab, 14% feint, 1% vanish).
One of the things I have a difficulty with is that the buff icons are at the top of the screen, and it is hard to see when slice and dice runs out. So I created this little addon that has a moveable window that displays the current status of slice and dice.
You can move the window using shift-right click and drag.
The commands are ;
/slicewatch showalways (always shows the window)
/slicewatch shownever (never shows the window)
/slicewatch showcombat (only shows the window in combat)
SliceWatch will not load if you’re not a rogue. (Which might mean it fails on the Euro servers because I might have the name wrong – let me know)
It currently changes the background colour to Red when there is less than 3 seconds left on Slice and Dice. This isn’t configurable (unless you edit the Lua)
Download the addon from here: SliceWatch
Edit: Update – minor bug with the showcombat option.